Graduate student Rajesh Bista receives the first place in the 2018 UNC GIS Day Map competition

Many UNC alumni may want to know a geography question – Where Our Proud UNC Chapel Hill Alumni Live? Our doctoral student Rajesh Bista created a map to solve this puzzle for this year’s UNC GIS Day map competition, and won the first place! Below is his map:

During the map competition event, when asked about the reason for creating this beautiful map, Rajesh gave the following story:

“As I am a student of geography, I view everything with spatial point of view. While coming home from school, I was reading a booklet which had a list of number of UNC alumni in different countries. I was curious to know how many alumni belonged to the country I came from but had to search for some time. I realized had the same information been presented as a map, how easy it would be for the readers to get the information. With this context, while I heard about the map competition, then I thought, why wouldn’t I try doing that! That’s how the idea of mapping UNC alumni spatially came into my mind. Using ArcGIS and my cartography skills, I hence showed where do our UNC alumni live globally. Using an inset map, I showed within US, how UNC alumni are distributed across the states. “